Articles archive
Articles on areas relating to web design & development.
Checking backlinks with Yahoo’s Site Explorer Inbound Links API
Recently I wanted to create a page that would list the backlinks to certain sites that I had chosen. Yahoo always seems to have the most comprehensive list of backlinks and luckily they also make available a series of APIs that enables you to access their data. Using the Site Explorer Inbound Links API, and an example of a script towards the bottom of that page, I was able to put together a script that closely mirrors the sort of results you would get if you entered a site’s URL into Yahoo’s Site Explorer.
More on Checking backlinks with Yahoo’s Site Explorer Inbound Links API
More useful extensions for developing with Firefox
A while ago I wrote about some of the extensions I use with Firefox which make the job of web development easier. I’ve since added some new ones to Firefox that I use on a fairly regular basis, so thought I should update the list.
Connecting to an external database from within a Wordpress post
For the article I wrote recently on web design galleries, I compiled a table of the galleries in a MySQL database. To be able to display the table and the associated charts and other statistics that went with it, I needed to be able to connect to this external database from within Wordpress.
More on Connecting to an external database from within a Wordpress post
PayPal options and Expression Engine’s Simple Commerce Module
Recently I had to add basic shopping cart functionality to a site that had been built with Expression Engine (my CMS of choice). “No problem,” I thought; I can use the Simple Commerce Module (SCM), which as the names suggests, is ideally suited to simple ecommerce requirements, and which I had used before on other EE sites.
More on PayPal options and Expression Engine’s Simple Commerce Module
What it’s like to run a web design gallery
Having compiled the list, done the numbers and dealt with the facts, I thought for the follow-up article to the The Ultimate Web Design Gallery Resource that I’d get some opinions from not only some of the people who run the web design galleries in the list about what it’s like to run one of these sites, but also some search engine optimisation (SEO) professionals about the perceived value of having your site included on one (or many).
First-letter bugginess
Recently I made some changes to the typography of subheadings on this site: I made them all uppercase and for the h2s I used the first-letter pseudo class to give the first letter a larger font-size (150%).
The Ultimate Web Design Gallery Resource
In case you haven’t noticed lately, there a LOT of web design galleries out there. I’d always kept bookmarks for the galleries I’d come across but recently while looking at one I noticed links to a lot of galleries that I hadn’t heard of before. So I thought it might be worthwhile to investigate just how many there were out there. I came across a few blog posts with links to galleries but rather than just adding to the list and then publishing it, I thought I’d do a bit more investigation and analysis.
Rescinding the reset
For a while now I’ve been using some sort of ‘reset’ for my stylesheets. At first it was the global reset which involves zeroing out padding and margins on all elements by with the universal selector, e.g., * { margin: 0; padding: 0 }. Later I read about the problems this can cause for form elements and so have been using Eric Meyer’s Reset CSS.
TinyMCE problem with Expression Engine in Firefox
I just encountered a problem installing the TinyMCE editor on an install of Expression Engine – all the files were uploaded correctly and the extension to get it working in Expression Engine was uploaded and properly activated, but the editor wouldn’t appear in Firefox 2 (other browsers were fine).
I found the solution to the problem at Tis How I Code. There’s also some further discussion of the issue on the Moxiecode forum.
Will the ’semantic web’ see XHTML finally supercede HTML?
Theres’ been a bit of news recently about the ’semantic web‘ (or data web) with Yahoo! announcing that their new Search Open Ecosystem will support semantic web standards, thereby providing a far richer and more useful search experience. Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the Internet, even believes that the rise of the semantic web could see the wane of Google.
More on Will the ’semantic web’ see XHTML finally supercede HTML?
