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October, 2005 Archive

How To Test Google Adsense On Your Website

Thursday, October 27th, 2005

Google Adsense has the power to make very little money, or a tremendous amount of money, all on the same website. The disparity in income usually comes from poor ad placement, colors, and ad types.
Google Adsense Colors
There are generally three schools of thought regarding the color of Google Adsense ads on a website.

Mimic the Color [...]

Posted in Contextual Advertising, Google Adsense | 1 Comment »

Redirect After Form Processing

Thursday, October 27th, 2005

After processing an html form, it is often a good idea to redirect the user to a new url, rather than just presenting the results. Consider this php example:

if ($_POST["name"]) {
# do something
print "Thanks for posting " . $_POST["name"] . "<br>";
}

After processing the form input, it prints a message. [...]

Posted in Open Source, PHP, Programming, Usability, Web Design | No Comments »

Sitening Hires New Web Designer and Website Marketing Strategist

Wednesday, October 26th, 2005

Sitening, a premier web development firm specializing in strategic open source solutions, has named Jon Henshaw to the position of Senior Designer and Website Marketing Strategist. Mr. Henshaw will expand the firm’s focus on web development.
Mr. Henshaw brings to Sitening many years of experience in web design, search engine optimization and usability engineering. Mr. Henshaw [...]

Posted in Company News, Press Releases | No Comments »

Is OpenOffice.org 2.0 Ready For Mac?

Tuesday, October 25th, 2005

When it comes to productivity choices for the Mac, the pickings are slim. Microsoft Office for Mac dominates when it comes to fee-based licenses, and keeps several small packages as distance friends (or enemies depending on how you look at it).
If you’re the paying type, here’s a few fee-based solutions (mainly word processors) available for [...]

Posted in OpenOffice.org, Productivity | 7 Comments »

Scheduling Jobs with Crontab and At

Monday, October 24th, 2005

I’ve been a long time crontab user, but recently it was requested that I use at for scheduling some weekly jobs. at was preferred because it is a queue, so you can add jobs that will run at a specified time, then the queue can be listed and modified. With crontab you have [...]

Posted in Open Source, Programming | No Comments »

Using PHP to Include RSS Feeds

Monday, October 24th, 2005

We needed some code to include RSS feeds on our web site. I quickly found Magpie RSS, which is a PHP library for fetching, parsing, and even caching feeds.
MagpieRSS is compatible with RSS 0.9 through RSS 1.0. Also parses RSS 1.0’s modules, RSS 2.0, and Atom. (with a few exceptions)
Jon wanted the function to [...]

Posted in PHP | No Comments »

Mr. Monkey Brain

Saturday, October 22nd, 2005

I heard an interview with Steve Martin. When he’s “in the zone,” he does all his writing and creative work. When he’s not in the zone, he does the monkey brain stuff, like editing. The monkey brain, he said, can do the mundane, mimicking, non-creative work. No disrespect to copy editors, [...]

Posted in Programming | No Comments »

Bootclean Whacked My Sockets

Monday, October 17th, 2005

PostgreSQL and MySQL can both use local sockets to handle communication between the client and the server. An indepth description of sockets can be found here, but basically they are special files that act like network connections. The difference is that instead of being available over the network, it’s only available locally. [...]

Posted in Databases, MySQL, Open Source, PostgreSQL | 3 Comments »

CSS Styles Without IDs And Classes

Monday, October 17th, 2005

Many designers feel like they have to add an ID or Class to every HTML element they want to apply a style to. Fortunately, with CSS, you don’t have to. CSS can apply styles to HTML elements without using an ID or Class.
Styles can be applied to any HTML element, including the BODY, TABLE, TD, [...]

Posted in CSS, Web Design | No Comments »

Usable Means Simple

Monday, October 17th, 2005

Can we make that rotate, and this flash?
Although the actual question varies among clients, the premise remains the same. Clients and multimedia artists want cool, and cool to them often means whiz-bang-flash-pop!
I’ve been developing websites for over 10 years, and I’ve started to see an interesting shift back to the basics. Originally, in the days [...]

Posted in Usability, Web Design | No Comments »