Torrential Web Dev

The Zend developer zone recently highlighted an interesting article comparing four different ways of handling json in php. It isn't set out as well as it could be but it has some solid content and is well worth a read if you intend to do any work in sending data between php and javascript.

Some interesting news has emerged from seroundtable highlighting that google is no longer supporting their SOAP Search API. Apparently support ended on the 5th December 2006.

We are now 'encouraged' to use the AJAX Search API instead. It is probably a positive replacement in generating search facilities for website users but I'm not sure how it will perform the data mining tasks webmasters typically used the SOAP API for in the past.

I've just recently found an article (via digg) looking at 30 tips for effective web design. Overall it is a nice summary. I do have a few issues with it though. Continue reading "30 Tips to Effective Web Design"

I have now moved the blog over to a new domain which I hope I will be able to develop more fully in the coming months. This move was inspired by the site re-design (which is still far from finished) as I didn't really feel that jmstreet.info was the correct place to be covering the type of content I want to address on this blog.

Hopefully I haven't broken any links. There will still be some pointing back to jmstreet.info but they should continue working without any problems. There is some basic mod_rewriting going on but everything should be going where it needs to go.

I've got a stack of ideas I want to address in terms of tutorials, scripts and services I want to create and write about but first I want to get the new site design launched.

I've been posting quite a bit recently at the digital point forums and have made a couple of contributions to this thread looking at installation scripts. My first post was looking at verifying that all files were present. This is an idea that requires some more work and I'll probably write up a class and post about it here in the future.

As an after-thought I also suggested that an installation script should offer the user the option to register for security announcements from the developer. Continue reading "Option to register in installation scripts."

I rank well for the weirdest things.

Recently I've been trying out some web analytics tools and I thought I would share some of my discoveries. I'm mainly going to talk about the search queries I rank well for. If you are interested then read on, if not then let me summarise by saying I rank well for the strangest things.


Continue reading "The long tail of search"