Cut a short story even shorter, the sales person could not offer me any laptop with win 7 pro, probably due to an agreement with licensing. I would have to purchase an upgrade pro or full version and pay them to install it. The sales guy could not offer me any alternative.

I know this sounds a bit of a rant but I was quite shocked about un-helpful a PC World was because it suppose to specialise in this area.

It is a group of videos and presentations regarding web development from speeding up JavaScript to completely changing the architecture of big web applications to run them more efficiently. This is taken from smashing magazine with an interesting video from the co-founder of reddit.

Seven Must See Videos and Presentations for Web App Developers

It is a list of all developers/ designers/ IT support have come across in their day to day lives when dealing with clients. Check this site out and see if you come across any scenarios which seem familiar to you.

http://clientsfromhell.net

The problem is now that many reviews now are fake reviews either paid by the competitor or caused by people spamming a certain product based in popularity / ehnical status. Apple anyone?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/8826258.stm

An  little funny comic strip based on the web designer and the client.

This is taken from the oatmeal and expresses the frustration all developers/ designers sometimes have with the client.

the asp.net website offers video tutorials on how to implement a website using the asp.net framework. As you know at the moment I am learning asp.net to help me progress further in my career. I hope this helps anyone who is trying to learn the framework using either visualbasic.net or c#.

Although version 4.0 is out now there are new and improved way of doing things, even though some videos are quite old it will give you a better understanding on how it works.

What is email scraping?

Everyone knows that websites tend to display contact details, whether it is on a contact page or displayed at the top of the screen in a header.
These contact details normally contain an email address highlighted as a link. A custom made script, maybe a spider would crawl these sites and gather emails to sell to people at a price. Thus making money from your details.

Ways of prevention

There has been many different ways to prevent email to being scraped. Some developers when writing out emails use (at) instead of @ in there email addresses. For example randomname(at)email.com instead of randomname@email.com. Another method is to encode the email address using ASCII. such as @ which is a ASCII representation of @. There are even services that allows you to encode email addresses.

The problem

To be honest I am not even sure if taking these procedures can prevent email scraping just mainly reduce it. And from my knowledge these are the only methods. If anyone would like to give any input on this situation please do. I don’t think the problem is as big as it was a couple of years back but it is still a problem.

The problem

The problem is that automated scripts / users fill out forms advertising information which is considered garbage. While to us we do not take any notice but for them a link helps improve their site in search results or make money and even some cases spread viruses. It is a major problem that is not going away anytime soon.

The solution

The standard solution
Server side validation using a regular expression or validation routine checks for valid emails and to apply strict rules in the inquiry area. For example not allowing emails, web addresses. This depends on what information you are gathering from the form. This can be programmed in such languages such as ASP and PHP. This is basic practice but in conjunction with other methods this can be improved.

The client side
Probably the poorest form of validation is client side. This is mainly for the user using the form. Based on JavaScript this can easy be turned off by the user and automated scripts can easy bypass this method. This should be used in conjunction with server side validation and never use this on its own.

Advanced spam checks

Now we know 2 forms of methods in conjunction can help reduce spam you can also apply these advanced methods to produce a stable contact form which can reduce spam to almost zero.

Domain validation
Within your code you should compare against the domain it is sending from. When sending information through a form you will go through this through a web address i.e. www.skylight-studios.co.uk. This helps prevent scripts from accessing a form through through another portal and only email is sent through your domain is accepted.

Captcha
This is a popular way of reducing spam. While not full proof and for accessibility can prove problematic still a great way where a user can identify what is written on the screen and follow human instructions where scripts can not pass. While this was the most efficient way of reducing spam, use this with caution as it can cause problems with the user.

Hidden field
This is a very clever way to reduce spam. Within the fields that are sent through the system an included hidden field where anything gets inputted the email is instantly rejected. This is not hidden as a property within the form but hidden through CSS from the user where scripts are not able to process. Scripts run through forms filling out information to send but even the most advanced scripts will not be able to tell which fields should not be filled thus fooling the script.

Overall

Getting a right mixture of email validation and checks can help reduce spam but overload the system can cause ordinary users to move elsewhere. Simplicity, subtle and gracefully is the key to how the validation process should work. Clients do not like spam as I have come across it many times when developing websites.

One of the issues which is greatly overlooked is SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. Think of when it comes to releasing a product, you have your research, your production and your marketing. Think of SEO as the marketing side of your service /  product.

So how do you optimise your already built product in this case your website? WordPress / 3rd parties offering tools / plug-ins which allows you to configure your website to allow optimisation on your website. This blog uses plug ins that allow pages to become SEO friendly to help boost SEO ranking performance.

It is important you also have a google webmasters account and any sort of analytics program, for this website I use google analytics to monitor my traffic. I also use it for a lot of sites I build. It is slightly more advanced than the typical stats type package but once you used it a few weeks you can get the hang of it.

Tools

These tools can be found in the plug-ins section of wordpress…

• All in one SEO Pack
  Quite a good SEO pack, allows to add meta information, a title, description to each page.
• Google Analytics for WordPress
  You can use this to apply your google analytics code to the site to read stats within each article / page.
• Google XML Sitemap
  This is important to get your site indexed quickly and efficiently with conjunction with google webmaster tools.
• Redirection
  No one likes going to a link on google finding out that the page is not found. Redirection prevents that offering a more efficient way of directing you to the right content on the site.

Optimising wordpress

So we know the tools, we know, Google webmaster helps sort out indexing problems and get your site indexed faster in Google. But what can we do to optimise wordpress. One handy tip which I have learnt from another site (applogies about this as I do not remember what the site name is) is to make article url’s user and SEO friendly.

Permalinks allows you to customise how to display your article urls. By default it shows a query string ?p=13432 which to any search engine is never good. Other customisation can be done but having a custom structure where displaying the title of the article helps wonders. What would you rather have wordpress.htm?p=13432 or wordpress/my-article?

To allow this you have to add /%postname%/ within the custom strcture in permalink settings.

Hopefully now your website over time should improve, make sure you use targeted keywords in your content as well without spamming your own content.

A lot of people have got it in their mind that starting from scratch is not always the best option. It would be cheaper to grab the information they already have on one system and transport it to another. For reasons such as their old system is buggy or sluggish and does not perform as well as it should.

more expensive?

From dealing with the past, converting code or in this instance the data from one system to another could actually prove more expensive. Because there is so much to take in to consideration. The name value pairs from one system most likely will not match up on the new system and different values don’t always match up. A simple example is the date format in a database.

In other examples looking away from the CMS is adding additional features within the website. Once website I have worked with required an age restriction on certain parts of the forum. This forum provided was a free forum which required a good understading the structrure of the code to apply specific parameters to check age of the user before displaying the content. Again while it sounds simple to the client can cause grief to the developer and most likely going over the budget.

Planning?

We have seen issue arise so a little forwarding planning, even inspecting the code and plan out a route can help maintain integrity and reduce risks on the way to changing the code. But time is an issue. For example quoting 200 pound to change forum code to allow age restriction to specific categories. An hourly rate is 40 pound. An average 2 hours of planning, discussing. This then reducing your time budget down to 120 pound on development time, then 20 pound for administration. It is so easy to lose money.

Should I take the job?

Is it important to understand every process of a job before it is undertaken. Otherwise unless your a master, issues can form and you end up spending every waking day trying to patch things right. While I have not run in to problems in the past, i certainly know a few where they have over estimated when it comes to managing other peoples code.