Summersault Weblog

So you’ve done it, you’ve taken the plunge and decided to maintain your own website. You’ve figured out how to insert images into your documents and make them pretty but every time you insert the picture it’s MASSIVE and takes up the entire screen. So, you manually scale the image down so it looks like the right size and then you publish the page. What’s the problem with this you ask? Simple, you’re still loading that MASSIVE image even though you’ve squeezed it into a smaller area. So your page will take much longer to load than it needs to and your image will not look nearly as clear as it should. You need to physically resize that image!

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Today, the Palladium-Item published Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter’s recently released “safe online shopping tips.” I thought I would comment and expand on these tips, especially as they relate to Summersault’s experiences with online commerce.
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We’re getting to the home stretch! Hopefully by now (if you’ve implemented some of the techniques we’ve talked about) you’ve seen an increase in the amount of traffic your website is getting. This time we’re going to focus on an often forgotten technique that is considered one of the most important items on this list of SEO tips. Header tags.

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As a Linux user, I’m a fan of “Flash Video” for Video content delivery on the web, used most visibly now by Google Video.

Flash video depends only on the Flash plugin, which nearly everyone has, is well supported on Linux and seems to generally “just work”. There also seems to be a lot of flexibility to integrate the player with the design of a particular website, which is a nice feature for developers.

Finally, Flash video is nice for the smaller file sizes of the video format. For example, converting my AVI file to the FLV format reduced the file size by about 75%!

I was pleased to find that there are already free, open source tools that allow me to publish content in the FLV using Linux. (But I believe the same tools could also work on Mac and Windows and provide some pointers for those platforms at the bottom.)

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When Summersault first started out, one of our goals was to try to help not-for-profit organizations take advantage of the technologies of the Internet when they might not otherwise be able to do so. Of course, we were thinking about all of the cool things we could do for them on their sites to help level the playing field and get their image and message out to the wider world…we weren’t always thinking about the fact that this goal doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a good business model for a tech startup. Many of the groups we wanted to help didn’t have the budget for even the simplest web presence, and on the other hand, there were a good number of non-profits out there with plenty of funds but with technical problems we had no interest in working on solving.
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I’d like to expand on one of the points in Tim Berners-Lee excellent recommendations on designing a good URL. He suggests leaving access out of the URL. An example of that would be the inclusion of “Public” in this bug tracking URL.

Tim is concerned about this primarily because URL access changes over time, causing the URL to need to change when the resource hasn’t changed.

There’s a bigger problem with putting access in URLs. In the era of web2.0, more sites are data-driven, providing different views of the same resource depending on how you access it. Commonly, an administrator may see links to edit and modify the data, while the public has fewer or no options to alter the content.

The problem comes when people try to share URLs to resource between different access groups. Instead of displaying the resource, the user may be prompted to login, since they are a different group than the one needed to view the resource. That’s somewhat silly– why block me from accessing a resource that I can see, even if it’s a bit different than what the sender sees?

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Reuters has an article out today, Internet users judge Web sites in less than a blink, noting the publication of a study in the journal Behavior and Information Technology finding that “people make aesthetic judgments that influence the rest of their experience with an Internet site” in one twentieth of a second, less than half of the time it takes to blink your eye. The implications for us as web developers are important, and its clear that being able to create quality graphical layouts built around extensive experience with web design still matters a lot. Of course, everyone responds to different designs in different ways so there’s no formula (as the article mentions) for how to get it right every time. But we feel like we’re doing an okay job so far.

Hopefully after our last article, Search Engine Optimization Vol. 3: The <title> Tag, you’ve seen an increase in your site traffic due to a higher search engine ranking. This time we’re going to focus on a lesser known tip that will go a long way not only to help your search engine ranking, but your visitors as well. I’m talking, of course, about text hyperlinks.

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One of the most frequent uses of Perl in my job is to validate web-based forms. Here’s some explanation and sample code to how I do that efficiently and effectively.

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Today I downloaded and tried the view preview release of Flock, a new web browser based on Firefox.

I went into the experience cynical, having used many browsers in my experience as a professional website developer. What else could they possibly add that I would really want?

I found one feature in Flock that by itself makes it worth considering the browser.

Flock has built a better bookmark.

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