Recently M$ started forcing users to upgrade to IE8. Of course there is no forcing, but they are strongly suggesting it, and for good reasons. For once, they have a browser that actually plays nicely with other browsers. Finally IE can stop being the kid on the playground that everyone punches in the face for no reason and can join the rest of the kids on the swings.

From a programmers standpoint, this could mean that IE6 is on it’s way out. I mean the only people still using IE6 are people who have refused the upgrade in the past.

So please, when you get that little dialog asking you to upgrade, please just do it… do it for the web!

In other news, Windows 7 is hopefully coming out in October, and M$ just released Bing which so far has had a pretty good response.

Maybe Microsoft will finally have a chance on the internet!

PS. There are some other neat videos too for SEO, Link Building and etc.

1. Firebug - It’s a great DOM inspector
2. Greasemonkey - Uses JavaScript to change the way a page loads
3. JSView - Allows me to preview all the JS/CSS on a page
4. Measure It - Allows me to get dimensions of a web page on the fly
5. Screengrab - Allows me to grab images from a web page or copy the entire page
6. Regular Expressions Tester - This one speaks for itself
7. Web Developer Toolbar - This is an all in one dev toolbar. It does a ton of stuff
8. YSlow - Find out why your pages are loading slow ( requires firebug )
9. Fire Encrypter - Encrypts Passwords on the fly
10. Dummy Lipsm - Inserts dummy lipsum into a page for testing purposes.

These are just a few that I’ve been using for a while. There are more that I have installed, but don’t use on a daily basis.

There’s even a new one I want to check out it’s FirePHP - an extension that requires FireBug and helps debug PHP errors.

What extensions do you use and why?

First, This is what I was trying to do.
Here is an example of my code :

<form method="post" action="">
 <input name="size" type="checkbox" value="Small" />Small
 <input name="size" type="checkbox" value="Medium" />Medium
 <input name="size" type="checkbox" value="Large" />Large
 <input name="size" type="checkbox" value="Extra Large" />Extra Large
</form>

The problem with this was when I was trying to get the values using “$_POST(’size’);” - I wasn’t getting anything, at least not anything that could be stored in a database.

The first thing I needed to do was to put square brackets around the name field in the checkboxes.

Like this:

<form method="post" action="">
 <input name="size[]" type="checkbox" value="Small" />Small
 <input name="size[]" type="checkbox" value="Medium" />Medium
 <input name="size[]" type="checkbox" value="Large" />Large
 <input name="size[]" type="checkbox" value="Extra Large" />Extra Large
</form>

This will allow PHP to grab the correct values and store it as an ARRAY.

This is great and you would think it would work, right.. wrong. The information is now ready to be printed to the page, but cannot be stored this way. After searching around php.net, I came across the seralize function. By using this we can convert the ARRAY into a storable representation of a the “size” value.

Here’s the code :

<?php
     $size = serialize($_POST(’size’));
?>

Hope this helps.

Creating an informational web site or E-commerce store is much more than throwing a bunch of code together and hoping for the best.  At Solid Cactus our programming team tries to standardize our code as much as possibly once it has been tested and goes through a usability checklist.  Usability to us means every aspect of the site works as expected for everyone and everything that tries to use it. Usability needs to be checked for user interaction as much as search engine interaction.

If your web site has not been overhauled in a long time I recommend taking some time to pick out important pieces of that “ultimate checklist”. Look through your site and see if the result is acceptable. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself while going through your website:

• Do your Title, Keyword and Description Meta tags display information dynamically per page?
• Does the font size of your content make reading easy at different resolutions?
• Is your navigation easy to follow without cumbersome functionality?
• Is the content in an easily digestible layout?
• FILL IN THE BLANK…

The key to the success of your web site is ensuring the usability pieces are all in place. Once you go through your web site have someone else that is not so familiar with your site go through. Chances are they might find things that you overlooked. Compile a list of any concerns and get them resolved. With so many sites joining the web each day you can not afford to have an inferior web presence.

That’s right, Firefox has finally overtaken IE6. Suddenly, the sky seems brighter, the grass a bit greener, and all seems right with the world.
Looking at the graph provided in the article, the one thing that really puzzles me is the slight increase in IE6 usage in August of last year. I suppose it is a small enough of an increase as to not be statistically significant, but I have a strange mental image of hundreds and hundreds of people getting their old HP Pavilions running Windows 98 out of a closet and surfing their way over to StatCounter just to throw off the metrics. Anyway, congrats Firefox 3! Here’s to a bright future.

I know that I have, and I found a great tutorial as to how to do that!

Having your own server is actually really nice, especially if you are very in to programming. If you’ve got an old computer laying around that you dont’ really use anymore, than you’ve got the necessary equipment to have your own server. Now you can test your code out with out having to buy extra web space. You can leave that for your more important stuff.

While I don’t think it’s a smart idea to run an enterprise level website, it’s just one of those things that every program should have.

Check it out here!!

1. The use of CSS has been preferred by many developers who follow the W3 standards. HTML should be for content ONLY, styling should be controlled by CSS.

2. CSS allows the programming to be semantically meaningful. This makes development easier and lends to added functionality in products such as Screen Readers.

3. It also reduces the chance of error in programming because the old method of Table based programming would introduce nested Tables that were easily mismatched.

4. CSS is better than Tables as some browsers will not render all of the Table content until everything loads. CSS allows for incremental loading which offers viewers content immediately.

5. By using CSS layout SEO keyword rich content can appear before the code for the left nav, instead of after.

6. Having all of the “structure” of a website (via CSS) in one document means that less code is rendered each time a new page loads. Table layouts embed the structure code on each page every time. CSS just loads the code once and “caches” it (assuming the file is external) for use on any other page that needs it.

7. CSS improves rapid cosmetic site updates since the content and styling/structure are separate.

8. Industry leading books on website optimization continually focus on CSS, while Table based “optimizations” are virtually nonexistent.

9. CSS layouts leave the code (both RTML and HTML) easier to read and also debug.

10. Yahoo! as well as Yahoo Store uses CSS based layouts as their default structure language.

That’s not to mean that table based sites are absolutely terrible or (if you will indulge me in some internet-vernacular-parlance) “are teh suck”. Your site, if table based, has not burst into flames (…yet), and people don’t necessarily flee from it in droves after the first glance. In fact, sometimes it is impossible to tell the difference without looking at the code. So why all the hype?
Let’s go into a little more detail about number 7 above. The advantage of tables back in the day was that they were strong, it was hard to break your site if it was table based. Granted, things could look a little (very) boxy, but they more or less stayed in a straight line. Using Divs, on the other hand, allows for a lot more flexibility, although there is a small trade-off in terms of how difficult it is to break the layout. (Technically, it “bends” more than breaks.) The way I think about it is this: imagine that a table based site is like wearing a suite of armor, whereas a css-based site is like wearing a wetsuit.
Now if you were to tell me that tomorrow morning I was going to be pelted with rocks, I’d be all about the suit of armor over the wetsuit. But, if you were to tell me that I was only going to have only one change of clothes for the next 2 years, all of a sudden the wetsuit seems much more appealing. The fact that it is flexible is appealing; it allows for movement and grace. The same is true for your site. Your site is not likely going to be subjected to content that will threaten to break it, and if you try to put some in that does, you can always just remove it! But the look and feel, and general flow of your site? That is something you have to live with for awhile, so why not make it as flexible as possible? So, if your armor is showing a little rust, give us a call. We can definitely fit you with something a little more comfortable.