HostingCon 2007 (July 23-25) - Navy Pier, Chicago

Well, it’s confirmed. My business partner, Paul Hirsch, and I will be attending HostingCon in Chicago this July.

HostingCon is the largest Web hosting conference in the world, bringing together industry professionals to learn about the latest advances in related technology, business processes and marketing techniques.

Paul and I are both active participants on a number of forums, so it’ll be a great chance for us to put faces and voices to the usernames we interact with on a daily basis.

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May 21st, 2007 1:04pm Jamie Harrop Web Hosting Comments (0) Permalink

Page Includes - Not just for the obvious

It’s long been known that Web site includes (Server side includes, PHP includes, ASP includes etc) are a fantastic tool to enable us to work smarter, rather than harder. What could be better than updating one file which in turn updates multiple pages across one Web site? Well, short of browser support for multiple backgrounds suddenly becoming available, I can’t think of a more time saving, cool feature at a Web developers disposal.

However, as with all things great, includes are not being used to their full potential. Many developers seem to think includes are for your Web site navigation, header and your footer and nothing else. That’s simply not the case!

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May 19th, 2007 1:54pm Jamie Harrop Site Updates
Programming & Scripting Comments (4) Permalink

CSS Menus

Just a quick entry while I have two minutes. More blog entries coming from me in the near future.

Despite the influx in the use of CSS in recent years, I still see far too many people resort to Javascript when dealing with fancy menus on their Web sites. Now, I have no problem with people who use Javascript responsibly, in that the Javascript actually works and downgrades gracefully for those visitors with Javascript disabled (search engines included), but for the most part people disregard what happens when a search engine visits their Web site and it can’t navigate through the Web site.

So, for all those people who continue to use half-hearted Javascript for less-than-simple menu solutions, here is a fantastic resource for CSS based menus.

CSS Play: CSS Menus

May 17th, 2007 1:13pm Jamie Harrop CSS Comments (3) Permalink

Report: There Are Now Over 70 Million Blogs

Courtesy of Word of Mouth Marketing Association:

Blogospheric Expansion Continues

Technorati Blog TrackingOver 70 million blogs are being tracked by Technorati, and new blog posts are being added at a rate of 1.5 million per day (17 blog posts per second), according to the most recent State of the Blogosphere report from David Sifry. According to Sifry, 120,000 new blogs are being created very day (1.4 new blogs per second), and splogs (spam blogs) have continued to be a blogosphere nuisance with Technorati tracking between 3,000 and 7,000 splogs created each day.

Blogs have also become increasingly popular as news and information sources, according to the report. There are currently 22 blogs ranked in the Top 100 news and information sites (based on the number of links to them), which is a sharp incline from Q3 2006, at which time only 12 of the Top 100 news and information sites were blogs.

Full report at State of the Live Web, and commentary at Marketing VOX.

May 15th, 2007 4:49pm John Pozadzides Analytics & Statistics Comments (58) Permalink

Rules for High Performance Web Sites

This post courtesy of Rich Skrenta:

Steve Souders of Yahoo’s “Exceptional Performance Team” gave an insanely great presentation at Web 2.0 about optimizing website performance by focusing on front end issues. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see it in person but the Web 2.0 talks have just been put up and the ppt is fascinating and absolutely a must-read for anyone involved in web products.

His work has been serialized on the Yahoo user interface blog, and will also be published in an upcoming O’Reilly title (est publish date: Sep 07).
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May 15th, 2007 4:02pm John Pozadzides CSS
Monitoring & Testing
Tutorials
Programming & Scripting
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Douglas Crockford Lecture: The JavaScript Programming Language

The following 2 hours worth of videos make up a lecture by Douglass Crockford giving an overview of just about everything you ever wanted to know about the JavaScript programming language.

The accompanying slides can also be found here. Enjoy!
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May 12th, 2007 1:06am John Pozadzides Video
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Punish Spammers by Installing a HoneyPot

Project Honey PotEveryone hates spam, but what are you doing to help put an end to it? Well, now if you own a Web site you can seriously contribute to taking Spam off the streets! Just install a HoneyPot on your server and you’ll be helping to generate data that can actually put some Spammers behind bars.

According to the HoneyPot Project:

Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.

To participate in Project Honey Pot, webmasters need only install the Project Honey Pot software somewhere on their website. We handle the rest — automatically distributing addresses and receiving the mail they generate. As a result, we anticipate installing Project Honey Pot should not increase the traffic or load to your website.

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May 6th, 2007 11:54pm John Pozadzides Blogging
Service Providers
Plugins & Widgets
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Free Image Sources for Web Authors

P-51 MustangI do quite a bit of blogging and it seems I’m always looking for specific images to compliment the topics of my posts. I often turn to these primary sources:

Both of these sites have extensive libraries, good search functions, and offer free images.

If you know of other high-quality resources for free stock photography and Web graphics please share them with the rest of us.

May 6th, 2007 10:54pm John Pozadzides Graphics & Multimedia Comments (1) Permalink

Web Sites As Art

Web Page GraphicOk, this one is just for fun. Über Aharef has created a little application that converts any Web page into a colorful little graph.

It is totally useless, yet strangely amusing so obviously that makes it worth a look!

Another interesting thing is he provides the source code and if one were so inclined the code could be modified to make the graph dynamic and interactive. For example, clicking on one of the nodes could take you to another graph, or perhaps follow the link in question.

May 4th, 2007 12:14pm John Pozadzides Fun Stuff Comments (1) Permalink

SpiffY!Search - Inline Free-Form Yahoo Search

SpiffY!SearchI read little article in Make Magazine and decided to check out SpiffY!Search. It’s a fairly interesting little JavaScript that displays inline search results either from a traditional search form, or by mousing over preselected words.

I’m not certain exactly where I would use it but I’m sure there are good applications out there for it which I’m just not coming up with off the top of my head. So, check it out and let me know if you’ve got good ideas of how and where it could be used.

May 4th, 2007 10:47am John Pozadzides Plugins & Widgets Comments (0) Permalink