Now recently I’ve been asked alot about Search Engine Optimization, and how people can improve their own domain listings within Google, Bing, Yahoo and other Search engines without going into the whole symantic drama that is HTML coding.

Being a web developer I thought to myself there is no way to fix a ranking without editing the site! Or is there?… Apprently around 30% of company websites and other small organisations don’t realise that they are infact doing this and they kill off alot of their own rankings due to one little issue that is the www’s!

Still not with me? I’ll run you upto speed on what I’m referring to…
Believe it or not, you can actually ask Google, “How many pages of my website do you have in your memory?”… To do this you need to use the site:url syntax within a Google search, What Google will then do is reply with a list of all your domains pages. Fortunatly if you havn’t been savi and not added this very little fix you will see that Google will have dropped alot of originally decent content and placed it upon the other domain.

Google Search Comparisons

Without www’s

With www’s

Now the above is pretty obvious, I’ve requested all the pages that are in the google listing engine that are registered under the said sites. Obviously these two domains are the same… So why is google indexing them seperately? Thats down to how you have your server/site setup.

Ideally what you want is one domain that is either http://test.com or http://www.test.com and not both.

To fix the issue and gain your search engine rankings quickly you need to tell a visitor to go to either one or the other. Now the question I know you’re going to be asking is, “Which is better, www’s or no www’s?”. Now this is down to personal perference but I personally rather have no www’s, and i’ll explain why.

With the internet progressing with Twitter, Facebook, and other various mobile devices people are using urls more and more day in and day out. Now when you type addresses all day like I do you tent to get bored and annoyed at typing www’s time after time!

Also I actually prefer to go for with the other big reason, I love to use short URLs and www’s are annoying (In my opinion).

The mod_rewrite redirect fix

To impliment this into your site couldn’t be easier! Just FTP onto your webhosting and into the root directory of your hosting files, Usuallly that would be www/ or public_html/ (something like that) create a new file called .htaccess and open it up with your editor.

Paste in the following code.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.dancunningham.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://dancunningham.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]


Now if you have multiple Top Level Domains (TLD’s) then you might want to point them all to the same hosting server / directory. Again thats not a problem we can tell the site to handle these in a similar way. Just add the extra domains into your .htaccess like the below example and the apache server will handle the rest.


RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.dancunningham.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://dancunningham.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.cunni.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://dancunningham.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]


I hope that this tutorial makes sense and helps those who are suffering fundamental search engine ranking issues! I only know of these issues as I’ve experienced them for myself. So again im simply passing on some knowledge to help others learn from mine. If anyone has anything they wish to add or comment on then please do so below.

This is a common error that occurs when some element on a secure web page (one that is loaded with https:// in the address bar) is not being loaded from a secure source. This usually occurs with images, frames, iframes, Flash, and JavaScripts. There are a few ways to fix it:
1. Change all URLs to https

Just open up the offending web page and search for http://. Change the references on all images, iframes, Flash, and Javascripts to https://. For example.

<img src="https://www.domain.com/image.gif" alt="" />

This may not work if you are loading an image from another site that does not have SSL set up. Also, with this method you’ll be loading SSL images even when the client is loading from a non-secure page. This will add extra processing load on the server and client. This is definitely not recommended for a high volume site.
2. Change all links to // or make them relative

Rather than changing all the links to https://, change them to just //

<img src="//www.domain.com/image.gif" alt="" />

Alternatively, if the images or scripts are located on the same domain, you can access them relatively, rather than absolutely:

<img src="image.gif" alt="" />

Using this method, the browser will know that it must load the image securely if the web page is being loaded securely but it will also load the image normally if the page is not being accessed securely. The image will still need to be available on the other server securely. This is likely the best method of getting rid of the pesky “Do you want to display the nonsecure items?” warnings.
3. Change the browser settings

It is best to change the code of the page that is giving the error, but if you don’t have access to change the code, you can always tell your personal web browser not to display that message. To do so follow these steps for Internet Explorer:

1. Go to Tools, Internet Options.
2. Select the “Security” Tab and then click on the “Custom Level” button.
3. Scroll down until you see the option: “Display mixed content”. Select “Enable”.
4. Click Ok. Then you will get a “Security Warning” pop-up. Click Yes.

One common reason that this warning shows up is using normal Google Analytics code on a secure page. It is a simple fix to enable Google Analytics on a page using SSL.

If you use the unsecure Google Analytics code on one of your secure web pages your web browser will warn that there is some page content that is not secure. This problem can be easily solved by slightly changing the code used to load Google Analytics.

Instead of:
<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
Use:
<script src="https://ssl.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>

If you still get the "page contains secure and nonsecure items" after changing that code you should check for other page elements that are using http instead of https.

Google’s information about using SSL with Google Analytics is also available.

Update: Google has now updated the Google Analytics code to use ga.js instead of the urchin.js file. In the process, they have implemented code that will automatically detect whether http or https needs to be used. The new code will also enable new features so it is recommended that you upgrade. This will solve the SSL problem so you won’t need to worry about the solution above. The upgrade instructions can be found here.

In an announcement earlier today, the Google (Google)-owned online video service stated that an HTML5-compatible player was the #1 request of its users. HTML5 is the upcoming new standard for the markup language behind most web pages, one that supports video, audio, drag-and-drop, canvas drawing, and many other new features and APIs.

Since HTML5 supports video embeds, YouTube has rolled out a version of its player that runs just on it. No browser plugins (e.g. Flash) are required to watch videos that support HTML5.

There are limitations, though. It doesn’t work with videos that have advertising, captions, or annotations. It also only works with HTML5-compatible browsers, meaning Chrome or Safari or Chrome Frame for IE if you so choose not to use a third party browser due to its looks/navigational differences.

You can take a look at a demo of the new HTML5 player here. As you can probably tell, it could use some more work, but YouTube promises to improve the interface over time.

We think this is a step in the right direction. While we don’t think Google should just switch over to HTML5 (Flash just allows for more functionality), we do think user should have the option. This is great to see a big website moving up in the support for new browsers and newly impressed code. I hope this means that someday the guys over at http://www.w3.org do make a HTML string that denied the use of Internet Explorer 6 though! *kneels & prays*

Source: mashable.com

How apprently a framework is supposed to make you code things correctly into various libs and use them consistantly throught the backend code. The only issue with that is, most of the bespoke content that I write requires unique libs that are only referenced once, this makes the whole point of using a framework silly as I’m not actually saving anytime at all by doing this.

I did look into various frameworks though, and i have found that the following ones are really quite good, and depending on your knowledge and speed in picking up various code languages, you might want to have a dabble with some of these for yourself!

Frame Works
Code Igniter: http://codeigniter.com
Description: CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications. If you’re a developer who lives in the real world of shared hosting accounts and clients with deadlines, and if you’re tired of ponderously large and thoroughly undocumented frameworks

Cake PHP: http://cakephp.org
Description: CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications. Using commonly known design patterns like MVC and ORM within the convention over configuration paradigm, CakePHP reduces development costs and helps developers write less code.

Zend: http://framework.zend.com
Description: To provide a lightweight, loosely-coupled component library simplified to provide 4/5s of the functionality everyone needs and that lets you customize the other 20% to meet your specific business needs. By focusing on the most commonly needed functionality, we retain the simplified spirit of PHP programming, dramatically lower the learning curve, and your training costs – so developers get up-to-speed quickly.

ash.MVC: http://www.ash-mvc.org
Description: The basic approach of this framework is to adopt a middle-path approach between faster development cycle, and a robust and scalable application. Moreover, the schemes proposed in the framework stick to the line of simplicity all along.

WASP: http://wasp.sourceforge.net/content/
Description: WASP is a powerful web application framework built on PHP 5. WASP strives to allow web developers to make great applications with more fun and less code, but in the familiar playground of PHP.

All the above prooved to work well at doing very similar tasks, but each has there own way of doing it. If you like the community based type of projects then i suggest Code Igniter/Cake PHP/Zend is the path you’d need to take, but at the end of the day a frame work is a personal choice, so it is really each to their own. Me personally? well, Im just going to be dabbling in a bit of everything, usually coding bespoke code means I have to be able to appoach it from various sides. Im still unsure which path I’m wanting to take with MVC! *shrugs*

Now the only thing missing was something to enable me to use Mp3′s on the analogue decks, and having set about for a while looking at various differnt approches to this issue I settled with Serato, I had looked into many of the other brands of virtual vinyl production such as final scratch, but serato has been by far the best without the latency issues. Dont get me wrong, you’ll never beat propper vinyl! But Serato has a pretty good head for resampling time synced code!

Its quite honestly amazing!

Here’s a shot of how Serato works:

And another of the PC interface: