The most important consideration in video encoding is choosing a video codec. A future article will talk about how to pick the one that’s right for you, but for now I just want to introduce the concept and describe the playing field. (This information is likely to go out of date quickly; future readers, be aware that this was written in December 2008.) Read more – ‘Mark Pilgrim – A Gentle Introduction to Video Encoding: Lossy Video Codecs’.
Carpe diem on any duplicate content worries: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version. Read more – ‘Canonical URLs – What Are They All About?’.
Okay, so many of the points below aren’t purely my philosophy, but ideas and principles I have picked up along the way throughout my [development] career. Some relate to the UNIX philosophy, or even the Zen of Python, but wherever they’re from, they can be applied to many other domains. Read more – ‘My Work Philosophy’.
An increasingly popular technique among websites and in particular, blogs, is the idea of making URLs search engine friendly, or safe, on the premise that doing so will help search engine optimisation. By removing the obscure query string element of a URL and replacing it with keyword rich alternatives, not only makes it more readable for a human being, but also the venerable robots that allow our page content to be found in the first place. Read more – ‘Enabling Search Engine Safe URLs with Apache and htaccess’.
The first step to increasing your site’s visibility on the top search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN is to help their respective robots crawl and index your site. To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file. Conversely and importantly, webmasters can also notify the search engines about the existence and importance of pages with a sitemap.xml file Read more – ‘Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Webmaster Tools’.
The SQL Replace function enables us to look for a certain character phrase in a string and replace it with another character phrase. The updated string is then returned by the function. Read more – ‘SQL User-Defined Function: ReplaceChars’.
With the advent Google Chrome there has been a lot of media coverage regarding the browser’s uptake and how it will compete with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. This is where the User Agent becomes most valuable. Read more – ‘What's In Google Chrome's User-Agent String’.
This weeks Computer Weekly magazine's Downtime section has an interesting story: In what is likely to be better news for men than women, Microsoft's latest browser, Internet Explorer 8, boasts a feature that allows users to hide the trail of their web browsing. Read more – ‘Microsoft's Latest Browser Packaged with 'Porn Mode'’.
In the first part of this series I talked about setting yourself up in business. The next step is to publicise yourself and your skills. At this point, it is helpful to know exactly what line of work you want to be focusing on, since you will need to target your efforts. Read more – ‘Launching Yourself as a Freelancer – Publicity’.
