Extra JS
Last week I started experimenting with the Javascript Framework ExtJS to see if it could help expediate JS development. Going by my first impression it will do just exactly that and more!
Normally if I want to select an element by ID in Javascript I'd have to use this
var content = document.getElementById("content");
With ExtJS, I do the same thing with.
var content = Ext.get("content");
Big wow! I've saved myself from typing 10 characters. Well there's more. I can perform basically any action I want on this element by calling the right method.
content.setOpacity(.25);
This method call would set all of the elements within the content div to 25% opacity. Now if you've ever changed an objects opacity in CSS you'll understand that each browser implements it differently. Essentially you have to declare several statements to ensure that the relevant opacity attribute has been set for Firefox, IE and Safari.
Well ExtJS does all of this work for you. It simply provides you with an abstract method that performs the specific effect or action on the attribute you want without any hassle.
Select Me! No Me!
The Ext.select method is arguably more powerful than Ext.get. It allows you to select multiple items in a document and then perform a specific function on them. Ok so let's say that I wanted to set the opacity of only the H3 subheadings to 25% opacity, I'd use.
Ext.select('h3').setOpacity(.25);
That's it. To achieve this in Javascript I'd have to use about 30 lines of code and I've done it here in 1.
Pagerank's (finally) went to piss
So the much anticipated Pagerank update has been and gone and a lot of webmasters are now crying inconsolably into their soup. Why? Well Google Pagerank has dropped across the board, with sites reportedly losing as much as 3 PR points.
Hold on a minute. Why is this important?
The reason why most webmasters are upset about the PR drop is that their earnings from affiliate programs that factor in PR into their pay scale algorithms will nosedive. For example I was considering monetising the major project with Text Link Ads.
Text Link Ads only accept websites with a Page Rank value of 4+ and factor in this value when calculating how much a link is worth on your site. Now it seems that less emphasis is being placed on PR, which will seriously impact my marketing approach. This will impact any future campaign both positively and negatively....
- It's good in that the old PR dependant model was too easy to manipulate. You could simply buy 10 links on Digitalpoint from high PR sites and then cash in with a program like TLA.
- It's bad in that I'll have to create something of value that'll match the new criteria that sites will be assessed on. Which will involve a lot of hard work.
Keyword Research Tools
It's not enough to guess what users are searching for, you need to know the specifics. Thankfully there are a number of keyword tools on the net that help make selecting and targetting keywords childs play. Here are a few.
SEO Book Keyword Resarch
The SEO Book Research tool is a free keyword research web-app developed by SEO guru Aaron Wall. It cross references result data from the Overture Suggestion Tool, Google and Wordtracker to help give you a better insight of what keyphrases are both popular and easy to rank for.
Did I mention it's free?
Google Adwords Sandbox
The Google Adwords Sandbox was designed to help make keyword selection easier for Adwords users. It's also very useful for web designers in that it provided an "Avg Search Volume" column for each keyword. You can then sort the keywords by this attribute to help establish which keyphrases are worth targetting.
The downside of the Sandbox is that it isn't very specific with it's search volume data. How many daily searches is a "Low Search Volume", for instance?
The site related keywords function is much more useful. It asks you to input an URL (a competitors address for example) and then generates a list of keywords that appear on that site. It's a very effective way of kickstarting your keyword research and good for brain storming in general.
Overture Suggestion Tool
The Overture Suggestion tool enables you to find out just how often a term is searched for in the major SE's. Unfortunately it has two major problems. Firstly it doesn't break the information down by search engine. Secondly it doesn't distinguish between the plural forms of key phrases meaning "car" and "cars" are logged as the same keyphrase.
Since the SEO Book Keyword Research Tool incorporates this information into its resultset, Overture for me, is now semi-obsolete.
SEO BOOK Firefox Extension
Over the weekend I installed the SEO Book Firefox extension which provides additional SEO information about sites that appear in the search results. It incorporates the domain age, Page Rank, number of backlinks, Google Cache date into the search results, which provides an insight into why a site ranks well.
Mindzapping mindmapping
I've been seriously lazy for much of this week, so now I'm left with it all to do on a dark, cold miserable Tuesday night.
Ok so I downloaded Mindjet MindManager last night and I started playing with it tonight in an attempt to establish some concrete ideas / objectives about the major project. Some cool ideas surfaced during this session - my favourite being custom religion rituals. How cool would it be if someone could create their own religion and then specify their own holiday seasons? Very cool!
The project will only focus on spiritual or religious belief. Otherwise I'd be collecting useless information about how Jim in Australia thinks Beefburgers are tasty.
I don't really know what else to do or say at this point. Oh, I'm definitely going to use CakePHP for the project. Also since I'm moving to a VPS on Wednesday I'll be able to install and use PEAR modules. Hurray! At the minute I'm using 2 shared host accounts (Dreamhost and Hostgator) for my websites and it's a pain to maintain.
Dreamhost's SSH access is to bloody slow for my liking! I was helping someone transfer a website to another server and it took forever to process a zip command (which is something I learnt just tonight, it's seriously useful. Normally I'd have to download an entire Wordpress installation by FTP, file by file and it'd take forever.)
