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’.
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’.
For many web developers, whenever JavaScript is mentioned it provokes a rye smile; JavaScript is one of those programming languages that is rather avoided than embraced. This is not the fault of the language itself, but rather the browsers. Read more – ‘JavaScript Frameworks – Let There Be Light’.
The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML, and AJAX. The library sits comfortably amongst its peers, which, amongst many others, include Prototype, jQuery and Mootools. Arguably it can be said that the YUI library is the king among the JavaScript and CSS-libraries. With a vast number of well documented examples and near 100% compatibility amongst modern browsers, it would be difficult to find a comparable library. Read more – ‘Learning the Yahoo! User Interface Library – Book Review’.
You're a YouTube addict with a serious amount of uncut video footage that you want to upload. If you want to transform that footage into an Oscar winning video clip that will be viewed millions of times, you'll need to do a little editing. But buying editing tools isn't a cheap pasttime. Read more – ‘Online Video Editors’.
Adobe is slowly but surely increasing its online presence with the addition of four web-based tools; Buzzword, Share, Photoshop Express and Brio. Although these four applications currently function independently from each other, they have very similar user interfaces and with a small amount of work, these tools could be tied together, offering a new and unique online suite worth noticing. Read more – ‘Adobe's Expanding Online Empire’.
Adobe Integrated Runtime is more than just hot air, it traverses the previously unexplored space that exists between the Web and desktop applications.
Up until very recently, the void between the Web and the desktop seemed like a schism that could not be crossed. But since AIR's 1.0 release in February this year, a whole host of other applications are emerging to compete with AIR in the single site browser space. Read more – ‘More Than Just Hot AIR – Single Site Browsers’.
Social network portability is one of several user-interface ideas and suggestions in the area of data-portability. As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen (and trusted) tools or vendors. When you join a new site, you should be able to import or preferably subscribe to your profile information and your social network from any existing profile of yours. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together. This problem is solved by a number existing technologies and initiatives: Microformats, OpenID, OAuth, RDF, RSS, OPML and APML. Read more – ‘Data Portability for Social Networks’.
Douglas Crockford, in a four part series on Yahoo! Video, gives a great overview of the Javascript programming language and clears ups some misconceptions along the way. Read more – ‘The Javascript Programming Language’.
