Unfrozen Caveman Coder

It's all about the backlinks

2010-12-15T13:39:00.002-05:00

I know I've written in the past that I primarily do "on site SEO", making sure my client's site is friendly to both human visitors, and search engine spiders, but once that aspect is done, all that is left to do is build up the number of relevant backlinks to your site, and of course continue to add quality content to it. So, how do you do that? Well, there are numerous ways, one is to write

Save the binvironment !!!

2010-12-03T10:41:00.001-05:00

I came up with an expression about 10 years ago regarding 2 major players in the realm of technology, Intel makes em' faster, Microsoft makes em' slower... Taken at face value you might not get my meaning. What I mean is software developers will continue pushing the limits of the hardware of the times. The same is true today but now a broadband internet connection is a required hardware

Apparent java script problem with IE8

2010-11-22T10:05:00.000-05:00

<a href="http://www.somesite.com" onclick="location.href='./out.php?ID=XXX';return false;"> SITE NAME</a> The above works in every browser I tested except IE8. I've read many others have the same issue, but most forums were related to ASP, VB and .NET (whose developer's have an inclination to use Microsoft products for all things from browsing to buttering toast) and the suggested workarounds

Gonna party like it's 1989 !

2010-09-26T14:06:00.001-04:00

Sticking with my stolen song title methodology.. lame, I know. Anyways, I thought I'd touch on one of the little nuances of web development that can have a pretty large impact on a website's usability. Link colors and decoration. Webmasters have always had control over the color of their textual links, via the BODY tag, Then along came CSS and it became the new rage to make textual links look "

It's a wild world (wide web)

2010-08-15T15:43:00.001-04:00

Maybe showing my age here, by using a bit of Cat Steven's lyrics, but it's true, the world wide web is a wild and dangerous place. Just as a "user" you are subjected to emails, the least harmful of which want you to buy viagra, others try to trick you into divulging sensitive information, or worse, infect your computer with a trojan virus to later do the villains dirty work. If you are reading

Top on site SEO blunders

2010-07-21T12:55:00.004-04:00

You may not know it from looking at this blog, but I've been delving into on-site SEO since about 2003. In that time, I've discovered SEO is not so much about knowing what to do, it's primarily about knowing what not to do. In fact, roughly 50% of my SEO related work has been un-doing what some other SEO "expert" did. Nothing ruins a web based project like getting penalties or banned from

The flexability of Wordpress

2010-06-13T13:18:00.001-04:00

I am continually amazed at all the ways Wordpress can be used. Granted, it was initially intended to act as a blog, and still does of course, but it, it's thousands of plug-ins and themes have evolved, making Wordpress suitable for just about any web based endeavor you can think of. Speaking of add-ons. What Wordpress article would be complete without touting the can't live without add ons, so

Hiring a freelancer

2010-06-06T11:38:00.004-04:00

As a freelance web developer myself, I typically write from that perspective, but on occasion I need to outsource. So today I thought I'd share what I know about finding and hiring a freelancer.Where to look for freelancers.Well, if you are reading this you found one (Shameless resume link) but possibly I'm just not the right guy. You can alert thousands of freelancers, myself included, of your

We needed another Apollo 13 moment.

2010-06-03T12:49:00.000-04:00

Granted I usually talk about web related stuff here, but the problem in the Gulf of Mexico has been on my mind quite a bit lately. Nearing the 50th day that oil and gas has been spewing into the gulf I can't help but think how poorly the collective parties involved have handled the problem. I don't want to try and blame any one entity, the cause isn't my issue. It's the reaction, or rather lack

What is your website actually worth ?

2010-05-28T15:04:00.001-04:00

If you are curious what your own website is worth you likely have used one of the numerous online tools that calculate it's value. The problem is, these simply can not be accurate, and often give the website owner a false impression their site is worth much more than it actually is, or occasionally much less. Using one of my own site's I've tested numerous services that calculate a website's

The lost art of writing HTML

2010-05-17T11:56:00.001-04:00

I remember back in grade school, while I got pretty good grades for spelling and English grammar, I continually got bad marks for penmanship. Yes it's true, my handwriting was terrible. It seemed I was destined to print all my life, or maybe become a doctor, a profession where illegible scribblings is typical. But eventually, with practice my handwriting improved. Then along came the computer

Just because it has data in it does not make it a database.

2010-03-18T17:08:00.003-04:00

I am continually surprised when I find companies using makeshift ways to manage data. Sure, Betty who sells pottery on Ebay is probably fine using her email client as a CRM, but when I see fortune 500 companies rely on outdated copies of Outlook Express to act as a customer database I just sort of sigh and die a little bit inside. Outlook and Outlook Express are not databases, they are email

Search and replace where you need it.

2010-02-27T16:02:00.002-05:00

Being able to search and replace text, regardless of how it is stored is a humoungous time saver so I thought I'd share a couple methods I use. SSH BASH perl one line search replace I usually do my file editing & programming work via SSH with PuTTY so a command line search and replace is really handy especially when large amount of files are involved. Here is an example of altering one file . .

Microsoft Yahoo merger

2010-02-18T13:01:00.001-05:00

After Microsoft's failed attempt to simply buy Yahoo one would think they'd realize, or at least learn to be content with their place in the search engine pecking order, which is 2nd, or 3rd depending on where you look, but no. In classic more money than brains corporate fashion they'll be paying Yahoo to set aside it's own search engine and run a co-branded version of Microsoft's bing. For

ISS almost finished

2010-02-15T14:13:00.004-05:00

No tech talk today, well not internet related anyway. Wanted to talk about ISS, you know the almost 400 metric tons of materials and technology that has been shot into orbit and assembled, the international space station. Well, it is pretty close to completed. I remember 12 years ago when the first parts were launched thinking if all the countries involved can set aside petty bickering, focus on

Search engines hate my site !

2010-02-12T13:07:00.003-05:00

Ok, not actually my site, but some clients I have worked with in the past seemed convinced the cigar smoking bigwigs at certain search engine companies had a personal vendetta against them. I can apreciate the desire to increase traffic to your website, I have my own as well that I'd like to see improved (and it is gradually) but a word of caution. In the case of SEO, or more specifically on

Freelancers need to occosionally say no.

2010-01-22T13:46:00.003-05:00

As a freelance web developer I often find myself wrestling with morals. Should I work for a client with obvious or even questionable morals ? Should I help a client promote a product or service I wouldn't recommend to a friend ? Should I provide what the client is asking for even though I know it will detract from their web site's search engine performance ? While it's been hard at times, I

Top 5 most common PHP blunders

2009-11-04T19:28:00.004-05:00

PHP is a very flexible language. Flexible enough that someone with no programming experience at all can create useful programs, meanwhile appeasing the needs of the formally trained OOP programmers. Coders from either of these two groups have certainly written code that generated an error. Sometimes I just wish that either the errors were more helpful, or simply spat out a number, so you could

Some helpful mod rewrite rules to improve SEO.

2009-10-09T15:20:00.008-04:00

If you are new to creating websites, or just want add some new tricks to your existing skill set, getting a grasp on mod rewrite is a pretty good way to improve your website, both in terms of usiblity (for people) and improving search engine rankings (for bots). Getting started, the .htaccess file htacess is feature of Apache web server. If set up correctly, it gives the website owner a way to

Proxies PHP and XML OH MY

2009-09-30T12:48:00.004-04:00

I like PHP. I like XML, but like anything, it sometimes just flat out pisses me off. Such was the case when a host I had been gleefully fetching an RSS feed from decided they needed to move their website to a host that provides DDOS detection and protection. The happy little code snippet below, that had been chugging along for almost a year, and continued to work on other hosts suddenly broke...

Tiny little trickling income streams

2009-09-15T13:23:00.006-04:00

I know a lot of website owners that spend their time and money making their site as good as it can be. For them it's not about making a buck, it's about giving back, which is of course a good thing.. but, there is certainly nothing wrong with supplementing your income so that at the end of the month you are at least covering the costs of hosting your website, and if you come out ahead, well

Best freelance site

2009-08-12T15:51:00.005-04:00

I've been a freelancer for a few years now, using various websites to help me to find work, and after using them for a year or more, I've come to a firm decision one is just better than the others. Granted, I haven't tried every freelance site out there, after checking out several, I found I could get ample work by checking out these 4 every day. Also, I should point out, Freelancing isn't just

The magical mythical world of SEO

2009-08-11T13:45:00.005-04:00

Anybody with a website has no doubt heard the term SEO, Search Engine Optimization. In fact it is a billion dollar industry. Everyone seems to think there is some magic bullet that will miraculously rocket their web site to the top of the SERPs , that's short for Search Engine Result Pages by the way.Well the truth is, there simply isn't such a thing and anyone that tells you otherwise is either

Websites with Flash intros, things that make you go BLEH!

2009-08-11T10:01:00.001-04:00

As is hopefully apparent by now, I'm a freelance coder, eeking out an existence coding websites, writing niche applications, usually in PHP. Occasionally I'll run across a project where I am creating a web sites from the ground up, instead of extending/tweaking an existing site. When I get such a project, I find I am quite apprehensive to the response I get when I request a complete feature list

I'm a grumpy old man.

2009-08-09T11:44:00.002-04:00

I'm really not sure when it started, but just yesterday I was thoroughly convinced. I now inhabit the body of a grumpy old man. I've always thought myself to be a pretty optimistic. open minded and accepting person. That's all gone now.I know I was over the edge when I heard about a Chinese bride wearing a wedding gown that measured 1.25 miles long, apparently in an attempt to get into Guinness