Tracking Keyword Ranking Position with Google Analytics
Google recently announced a change in the format of the referring URL for visitors finding your site through keyword searches.
The new format promises to reveal much more information about the search result rankings that was previously available, and this post will show you how to take advantage of that information to tune your SEO efforts using Google Analytics.
Continue ReadingProfiling PHP with Xdebug and Webgrind
Finding and fixing performance bottlenecks in PHP web applications can be both time-consuming and difficult. Fortunately, free tools like Xdebug and Webgrind allow you to easily find and visualize bottlenecks in your PHP scripts.Webgrind is an Xdebug profiling web frontend in PHP5. It implements a subset of the features of kcachegrind and installs in seconds and works on all platforms.--WebgrindRead more
Google PageRank Update For The New Year
Google has updated their PageRank, just in time for the new year! Never heard of PageRank? PageRank is Google's method of determining how "valueable" it considers your page to be. According to Wikipedia, PageRank is defined as:
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set.Read more
Why WordPress Asks for Connection Info
One of the great features of WordPress is that it allows you to automatically install and upgrade plugins.
A common problem is that WordPress is unable to access the filesystem directly, which results in a page indicating that "To perform the requested action, connection information is required."
Read more6 Essential Firefox Add-ons
There are some add-ons for Firefox that are just so useful that I find myself installing them on every machine that I use on a regular basis. These add-ons are such an integral part of my everyday workflow, that I'm not sure I'd be able to get much done without them, and I think that you'll feel the same way once you give them a try (if you don't already have them installed, that is!)
Read moreA New Coat of Paint
Sometimes it's just time for a new look, and that was definitely the case around here. I've spruced up the joint with a nice clean theme called Downtown Java, by Brian Gardner.
I've already started making customizations with a new Twitter badge that features an icon from the free icon set Practika featured over at Smashing Magazine (If you don't read Smashing Magazine, you're really missing out!).
Look for more customizations over the next few days!
WordPress Static Front Pages Demystified
If you're like me, there is always some configuration option or another in the software that you use regularly which you are aware of, but don't really understand how it works. Until today, that was the case for me with WordPress static front pages.
Read moreForce Lower-Case URLs with mod_rewrite
You may find yourself in a situation at some point where you need to ensure that all access to your site is done using lower-case only. This may be because of SEO (avoiding duplicate content), or perhaps you want to ensure that you can seamlessly move between case-sensitive/insensitive operating systems. If you are running a standard LAMP stack, you're in luck. Apache's mod_rewrite can be used to 301-redirect all incoming requests to their lower-case counterparts with just a few configuration directives.
Read moreExtracting Translatable Strings From Zend_Validate
Recently I started working with Zend Framework's Zend_Form and its integrated automatic translation functionality using Zend_Translate. In general, the functionality is really great, but if you have ever tried to translate all of the possible validation error messages, you know that finding them can be a long manual task. Naturally, I brought this up on #zftalk, and the consensus seemed to be that the translatable messages could be extracted using a little PHP and ReflectionClass magic.
Read moreBenchmarking Zend Framework Routes
Hanging out in #zftalk on freenode is a great way to learn more about using Zend Framework, if you're not already there get yourself an IRC client and sign on. Recently, the following question was posed:
How can I create a route with an optional parameter; e.g /search/:foo/:bar, where :bar is optional? Do I need to create two different routes?
Several users correctly suggested specifying a default value for :bar when constructing the route, and it was also mentioned that both standard routes and regular expression routes could be used to solve the problem. Naturally, this lead to a discussion of which type of route would be fastest, with no real numbers to fall back on.
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