Business
Google Indexing Javascript / AJAX?
Saw a post this morning, Google Bot now crawls arbitrary Javascript sites.
Seems like not only is Google indexing javascript files, but executing them as if they were an actual user clicking (thus firing off related javascript calls properly).
Google Analytics: Find your Social Media Activity, a Tour
Google Analytics does a lot for us, and it does so much that we can’t always find some of the cooler functionality.
I recently discovered some VERY useful information regarding social media linking in Google Analytics.
Google Analytics will let you review the social media discussions and events (+1, Like, Bookmaarks, etc) and do the usual stuff with it.
To find your Social Media actions in Google Analytics:
- Log into Google Analytics and get to your Standard Reporting dashboard
- In the left nav, navigate to: Traffic Sources -> Social -> Pages
- Here you can see your most “Liked” content, but it gets better… (and the activity incoming from social networks)
- Click on any of the “Pages” in the list, I clicked the first link
- You can now see various Social Media networks that drive your traffic (“Social Referral”)
- Click on “Activity Steam”
- Here you land on the “Conversations” section, you can also click on the “Events” section (next to “Viewing” above the actual data)
- Great — but there’s more…
- Click on “ALL” under the “Pages” title (top left corner) — this can be done under events and conversations
Using this you can see all social media conversations sending links to your site, as well as all actions (and sometimes which user) that saved/liked/plussed your site.
Help: Uploading MP3s on WordPress doesn’t work
Today I ran into a minor issue with WordPress.
When uploading an MP3 file (in my case, although I’m sure many other file types) — I was getting an “HTTP Error” or “Internal Server Error” depending on how I uploaded the file. The file wasn’t even that big, just a 150K test file.
There were 2 things that had to happen..
Add an MP3 Mime Type
Out of the box, WordPress doesn’t want you to upload an MP3 file to the Media Library. You have to add it.
You can do this by using the “upload_mimes” hook in your functions.php file:
function addMimeTypes($mimes) {
$newmimes = array_merge($mimes, array(
'mp3' => 'audio/mpeg'
));
return $newmimes;
}
add_filter('upload_mimes', 'addMimeTypes');Disable FastCGI
Yes, unfortunately FastCGI use of PHP was causing me to have problems so I had to switch back to PHP being run as an Apache Module.
To do this, you’ll have to find out per your hosting provider how to do this. I’m at Media Temple and it was pretty easy.
Keep in mind that FastCGI lowers your memory usage, and disabling it may have other negative effects.
Google’s HTML/CSS Style Guide
Sorry for the deluge of posts today. This next one is a must read for web developers.
I’m not sure when it was first posted, but I just came across it today, the Google HTML/CSS Style Guide.
There are some useful reminders in there, and also some curveballs (beyond “Use Valid HTML where possible”):
- Omit protocol from embedded resources – this means your JS and CSS includes should use “//” as opposed to “http://”. This means whenever your code runs over HTTPS it won’t generate all those annoying popup windows.
- Don’t use Entity references – an interesting point. If your entire environment revolves around UTF-8, there is no need to encode special characters (except for < > and & because they are HTML code). Bye bye —
- Omit optional tags – skipping a few lines of code must save Google millions annually, but it’s interesting. I don’t know if I can stop writing “<head><title>Title Here</title></head>” … but according to HTML5 specifications it’s an optional tag, and you can just write “<title>Title Here</title>”.
- Hexadecimal Notation – Use 3 character notation where possible. I’ve been doing this, but didn’t realize it was a best practice (this may save Google hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, me? nothing).
- Alphabetize CSS declarations – I guess this makes sense, so there is at least SOME organization to CSS declarations
- Property name stops – For some reason Google WANTS room between a CSS property and the value (“value: 0px” vs “value:0px”). Seems odd to me, but at least it’s what I’ve always done
Google’s Matt Cutts on White Hat SEO Tactics
SEO professionals argue day in and day out about whether or not to use Black Hat SEO tactics. For those of you not aware of the difference between White Hat and Black Hat tactics, here’s a few bullets…
White Hat Techniques
- Improve usability of site
- Generate Content
- Improve site speed
- Marketing the site legitimately
- Technically implement the site correctly
- Anything a search engine would want you to do
Black Hat Techniques
- Buying links
- Keyword spamming
- Link circles
- Spam commenting / linking
- Farming out link generation
- Anything to fool a search engine into thinking you are bigger than you are
I will admit that for certain clients, it is useful to consider some black hat techniques. Black hat techniques come at a higher price tag, and much shorter term lifespan.
Matt Cutts (of Google), considered one of the closest things many of us have to seeing inside Google’s head, wrote an article talking about Google’s stance on White Hat versus Black Hat.
Firefox 12 Released
Finally Firefox has migrated to the “silent update” that has kept Chrome browsers updated.
Mozilla announced Firefox 12 today. You can download it at mozilla.org.
The big changes with this update are the auto-update functionality, and the improvements mad to Developer Tools.
You can check out some other improvements such as:
- Multitouch on Android support
- Network timeouts on XMLHttpRequests
- Line breaks in tooltips!
- Many more!
If only Microsoft would allow Internet Explorer to auto update…
Google Drive is Live
Today Google announced their newest offering, Google Drive.
Everyone gets 5GB of storage free. Other price points are:
- $2.49/month – 25 GB
- $4.99/month – 100GB
- $49.99/month – 1 TB (yes, 1000 GB)
Sure to be a major competitor to DropBox, as their prices beat out any competitor that I know of (if you know otherwise, let me know).
The new Google Drive service is available for PC / Mac, and Android devices currently. iPhone and iPad apps are sure to follow soon. Full integration with Google Docs is sure to push adoption of the technology (the instant sharing of edits is a great feature for remote collaboration).
WordPress 3.3.2 Released
Yesterday WordPress released version 3.3.2.
Included are some minor security fixes, and maintenance issues. Not database changes were made.
Chrome beats IE Usage on Sundays
Google’s Chrome browser has been beating out IE usage on weekends since March 18. People are choosing Chrome for their home browser, while being forced to use IE at work during the week.
Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Market Share
Due to Chrome’s automatic updates, more people are using Chrome 18 now, than any other browser version. It’s a delight for developers to know people are automatically going to be using the most recent version of a browser. Probably why I’d expect it to be the most recommended browser by web developers. The graph is amazing to see how quickly use of the “old” (Chrome 17) browser drops off and the new browser jumps up. Compare that to the IE8 and IE9 graphs. They are slowly switching (over years, not days).
Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Version Market Share
Chrome has been experiencing slow but unstoppable growth in browser usage.
Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Market Share
Thanks to StatCounter for the cool graphs.
WordPress 3.4 Beta 1 Released
This morning it was announced that the WordPress 3.4 Beta 1 was released.
If you are a web developer who develops custom themes and/or plugins, you should be watching the next release as there are changes very relevant to your work.
Here’s some of what’s new:
- Theme Customizer with Previewer
- Flexible Custom Header Sizes
- Selecting Custom Header and Background Images from Media Library
- Better experience searching for and choosing a theme
And some of the under-the-hood changes:
- New XML-RPC API for external and mobile applications
- New API for registering theme support for custom headers and backgrounds
- Performance improvements to WP_Query by splitting the query (Please test!)
- Internationalization improvements (improved performance and locale support)
- Performance and API improvements when working with lists of installed themes
- Support for installing child themes from the WordPress Themes Directory
You can download the WordPress 3.4 Beta 1 here.
Please share, it makes me happy:
Subscribe to Email Alerts
Make a Donation
Popular Posts
Follow Me
Recent Posts
Archives
Tags
Blogroll
- 456 Berea St
- ActionScript 3 Design Patterns
- adactio – home of Jeremy Keith
- ajaxian
- Boxes and Arrows
- Chris Brogan
- CSS Globe
- InsideRIA
- Jarrod Michael Studios
- Johan Brook: Designer and Developer
- Mad Vertices
- NETTUTS
- Portsmouth Community Calendar
- Roomware Blog
- Signal vs. Noise
- Six Revisions
- Snook
- Style Grind
- Tiago’s Weblog
- Viget Extend
- Vitamin
- Whats the latest
- Woork
- zupko.info